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Vegas' Less Drunken Less Rambley Confession - Hollyoak House
5 - October 2015, GM: Claire, Hunters: Vegas, Luiz, Morgan, Paddington, Tom, Player: Chloe Sword of Neberkenezer There was an unknown agency attempting to trap or kill member’s of the Grand Coven and they appear to have a base in New Mexico. There’s a hell of a lot of prophecies in St George, Utah. Vegas has a few books on the Grand Coven that they found in one of Henry’s book storage locations. ...cont... And of course, none of you let have heard me bring up Tom yet. At least not by name. Tom is….Tom is probably my... biggest screw up. The deal - now, that’s my biggest regret. But there wasn’t too much I could do about that - a demon twists your arm, you sign the goddamn paper - but leaving Tom....that was my choice. So, I get a call from Tom last week. He’s a hunter now. When I left our home, the biggest workout his muscles got were when he did that trick to pop the buttons on his shirt open or kicking a rowdy customer out of the bar. And he’s so calm about everything. He tells me he got my number from Mattie - y’know, the journalist who broke the story on my deal - after he met her on a hunt and she put the pieces together about Vegas' real name, Elliot Roth. He says he needs to see me. There’s a hunt just came up on the Sloppy Joe’s forum less than two hours away from Las Vegas so I suggest that as the meet up place and time - neutral ground and all. The ground is a little less neutral than I had hoped - two of the other hunters, Luiz and Morgan, have been hunting quite a bit with Tom and it’s pretty clear what they think of me. The other guy is called Paddington is a book shop owner who I once went to for suggestions on how to get out of my deal - I don’t think he dislikes me, but I also don’t think you can’t answer that question for a person and keep thinking that they’re all puppies and rainbows. Now the hunt. I’m sure you’ve heard about the Hollyoak Murders in St George? Up in Utah but only a few town over really. Twenty-one years ago, in early October, a man comes home from taking two of his kids to their grandfather’s and find that the other six members of his family have turned on each other - everyone was slaughtered. And now, a few night ago, the whole place goes up in flames leaving behind three charred bodies just days after Big Henry (a hunter from dinosaur times) goes to check out a house in the area. I meet up with Paddington before the rest of them and we do some quick recon at the Law Library and the Town Hall. Paddington notices that the layout of the town works to channel and focus ley lines down the streets - he thinks it’ll make some places harder to do magic and some places easier. Stuff like that doesn’t really affect me directly - I don’t touch the stuff - but I find that other people tend to make massive messes by touching it so chances are it’ll be connected to the deaths - old and new. At the Town Hall, Paddington finds out that a few families have been in control of this town since the beginning while I discover that the receptionist has cut my ‘guest account’ off from, like, 75% of the files they have. I mean, nobody get arrested this time but the overall security in the entire place is kinda ridiculous for a building that contains mostly public records….and that room of obnoxiously valuable books that Paddington finds down with the physical files. We head to a diner to discuss what the others have found. They went to the Hollyoak house and stepped back in time to view the night of the fire. Tom does magic now - he says he melted his salt-filled hula hoop doing the spell, which…..at least explains the hula hoop situation he was in when I first saw him. From this we realise that Big Henry is Henry Pearson, grandfather and father to some of the victims of the Hollyoak murders. Also, that Henry Pearson went into the Hollyoak house on the night of the fire with weapons and two young adults we figure are likely to be his two remaining grandchildren. So that means that all victims were members of some of the lineage families identified by Paddington in the Town Hall. From Tom, we also have an attacker - a person in a balaclava who entered the house after the Pearson’s, left with their weapons and appeared to set the place on flames. All of this made me very interested in the location of the Ethan Roberts, husband of Henry’s daughter, and now the only remaining member of that immediate family. Through completely unbiased chip falling, Tom and I end up going to see Ethan Roberts at the psychiatric ward while Paddington, Morgan and Luiz investigate the bodies at the morgue. It’s probably worth noting that I’ve been pulling out that Las Vegas Police Badge I swiped while investigating the Sword of Neberkenezer - which, based on this mission alone, has to be the most profitable flirting venture I’ve ever undertaken. I’ll be honest, at this point, I thought it was all going to be a conspiracy... That we’d find Ethan Roberts upset but sane - having been locked up by the town leaders for something he knew. This definitely didn’t seem to be the case. So, basically, things didn’t go amazingly until Tom performed another piece of magic on Ethan’s emotions - moving them on to himself. From the newly calm Ethan, I find out that the town was in danger from most other magical organisations because of the large collection of prophecies held in the town - possibly the books that Paddington noticed in the Town Hall. But....then there’s Tom. Everything that was passed from Ethan breaks the dam inside Tom. In one ear I’m getting information about the case and in the other I’m hearing, in completely unfiltered terms, what I did to Tom by running away - how he thought I’d been kidnapped, how he tried to fight the demon he saw me with, the months he spent in a coma after what the demon did to him, all the way up to last month when he tried to kill himself during a hunt - if I hadn’t been focussed on making use of the time the spell had given us I would have cracked in a second. It’s about then that the others - having determined that the bodies were altered by magic post-mortem, and that Big Henry had been on a witch hunt to avenge his family’s murder - decide to torch the corpse, setting off the fire alarms in the entire hospital. Including the psyche ward. We get evacuated along with the entire ward into a secure holding pen - we’re clearly not going anywhere in a hurry. As we’re sitting there I try to talk to Tom about what he said back in Ethan’s room but I hadn’t realised how little information Mattie had given him about Vegas and the deal I made with the fucking Devil. He clams up as soon as I drop that bombshell and we spend the next few hours in silence until they let us back into the ward to collect our belongings. The next morning we go to the book collection underneath the Catholic Church that the ghost of Big Henry told the others about. We grab some useful books and head over to a diner. We’re not even hungry at this point but Tom has called a psychic that seems to have a direct link to Tom’s future and she warns him to beware three men in tactical assault gear near a diner. They show up and we face off after a few minutes of Paddington absolutely schooling them at the American Law System. Well, everyone else faces off while I investigate the van and ensure to ‘eliminate’ any ‘retreat plans’ they might have… ...I slash their tyres. But it’s always been that way for me and Tom - I do the talking the best I can but if the talking doesn’t work out, Tom’s there to protect us the best way he knows. We conduct a bit more investigation when they finish. The people in assault gear were hoping to get to members of the Grand Coven using the library under the Church and we just happened to show up first. We don't really know how Henry and the kids ended up dead - but it's likely to do with the fact that he owned the books they wanted. We can’t identify what organisation they were from, only that they seem to be well funded with lots of gear but have downright amatuer ID forgery. We end up finding that their base is probably somewhere in New Mexico. But I guess I’ll find out more about that anoth….oh..... Nevermind…. As we were leaving, Tom came up beside me. Good bye, Vegas. Just like that, wiping Elli away with one word. It hurt, but I can’t blame him - it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do since I left him. But what can I say to him? I was scared? For him...and for me? Of what this might do to us? Or that I was ashamed...at my own weakness before death? Or that my pride wouldn't let him see me like this. And I’m still all of those things...the look on his face as I accidentally let the truth of my deal slip... I don’t think I could have ever done that by choice, but... when I think about how it felt seeing him, for the first time in months, I realise my leaving hurt both of us more than coming clean ever could...I've got less than one month on the clock but I'm done running and now, I just... I don’t want to leave you again. “Why don’t you come in, then? We can talk.”